IV Lines: You’re Doin’ It Wrong

A quick contribution to this month’s Medical Monday. I am in the last week of Family Medicine and trying to finish of the mass of projects we have to present this week. Additionally I have just realised that my first set of exams (the B.Ch-part, a.k.a. Surgery) is in two months. I am not feeling prepared for that and will definitely need to focus more intently on studying.

Anyway, here is an incident that made me laugh. The rural hospital where I am working is relatively small and sometimes, patients sleep over at Outpatients’ Department while awaiting a bed. We start their treatment in the meanwhile, run tests and set up IV-infusions. The next morning, OPD essentially as its own “ward round”.

We were scratching our heads as to why a certain patient had not received her treatment overnight. Then we saw her IV line.

(As you can see, that IV isn’t going anywhere but down the drain.) As we are fairly certain that no nurse or doctor would have done this, the only conclusion we could reach was that the IV came out and the patient or a relative tried to “put it back.”

Regardless, we had a good laugh. This has got to be even funnier than when this happened.

Fortunately the patient was no worse for wear that we could see. We suspect she pulled it out and was too embarrassed to ask for help overnight, because I don’t think any of the nurses would do that and leave it such.